How-To Manage Sales Categories only in BigCommerce with Acumatica Commerce Edition

This is great, thanks @smarenich 

One additional note. When you export the “Unassigned” category to BC, you’ll obviously want to mark it as “Hidden” in the BC Admin.

Also, if you do not want the product to be visible to the public until you’re ready, use the “Visible” and “Invisible” settings on the eComm tab within Stock Items to hide the product on export. Just remember to revert it in Acumatica once you’re ready for it to be public.

@smarenich,

Does this work with any version of Acumatica that has the BC Connector? What about 20.111.0017.49?

Thanks,
Seth

Hi Seth, This customization is done and tested with 2020r2, but you can try on 2020r1 too.

You should publish it with the BigCommerce customization project.

I have sales categories set up as bidirectional and I have 160 products or so that won't sync over to bigcommerce. The error message says the products category does not exist. If I create the category in bigcommerce it still doesn't sync from acumatica to bigcommerce. Maybe it is referring to something else? Any suggestions on what I could check?

Maybe I should set sales categories as export only and then resync the sales categories and then try to resync the stock items?

I have tried several different things but nothing seems to work, so now I am posting questions online.

Thank you..

Hey cardfaux,

Have you done a “Full” Fetch/Prepare on the Sales Categories and then Process? It seems that at least one of the categories you have on your products is not synced to BigCommerce.

You might also look for any errors on the Sync Status screen for the Sales Category entity.

Seth

yes I have a couple of times, one time I set the SALES CATEGORY to export only, and another time I set it to bidirectional. But the same stock items had the same error messages.

When trying to sync the STOCK items the error message says,

“Error: categories The product category (82) does not exist; Status: 422”

When trying to sync the SALES CATEGORIES it will either say the category already exists, or there is a prerequisite. But if it says the category already exists then why does the stock item say it does not? The prerequisite error is probably from the category not having a parent category.

I just thought maybe I was missing something or overlooking something.

If all of the SALES CATEGORY are being handled in Acumatica then the SALES CATEGORY should probably be set to export instead of BIDIRECTIONAL?

THANK YOU

Are there any other product category errors? It looks like the one with id 82 in BigCommerce is not synced. The 82 would be in the URL in BigCommerce when you go into the category in BC:

And yes, if you want to manage the categories in Acumatica, you should set the Sales Category entity to a direction of “Export”

yeah all of the category errors come with a number to point to the category, I was having trouble trying to find where the number could be cross referenced.

Thank you, I will try to make some changes to how the SALES CATEGORY data is synced with BigCommerce.

THANK YOU

Sounds good. Good luck!

Also, just in case this plays, ensure that your Default Categories on the Inventory Settings of the BigCommerce Store use a category that’s synced. You should be able to see what’s synced on the Sync Status screen.

currently the default category is empty, but all of the products do have a SALES CATEGORY under the ATTRIBUTES tab of the STOCK ITEM.

Should I set a default category anyways? 

Yes. I would 100% add a default category. This will be the category that gets used if there are no sales categories on a product that you’re sending to BC. I believe you’ll still have to resolve your category errors, but this is a best practice and I would recommend it, yes.

Thank You.

@cardfaux  make sure you do not have any of the custom mappings and filterings in the Products and Sales Categories too.

Any mappings or filter there may lead to the same problem as you describe.

@smarenich , is it possible to make sales category field optional in the stock / non-stock items sync? It is not required by BigCommerce, why is it required by the connector? The use case: we need some items to be exported with categories, and some - without. The provided customization only allows to completely disregard sales categories, which is not what we’re trying to do. Thank you!

@yurik05 Sales Categories were mandatory on BigCommerce, so you were not able to even create a product without a sales category.

However, I just checked and BigCommerce really changed this logic. I have created an internal ticket to make sales categories optional in Acumatica too. We will deliver it in the future versions.

For not you can use customization or you can create a case and we will link it with the internal ticket. As soon as we complete the change, you will get a notification through the ticket.

@yurik05 - thanks for bringing this to our attention. I too was unaware that BigCommerce made this change.

Is there any update on best practice for this issue? We just upgraded to 2021 R2 and our VAR confirmed the BCOptionalCategories customization is now obsolete in this version. However, on initial full resync of item entities (stock, non stock, template), whatever sales categories (well out of date) present at the Acumatica item level were pushed to the storefront. Backup BC exports helped us rebuild the data, but is there a solution for managing categories on BC only going forward? 

@Phil in 2022r1 we have made categories sync optional in the product. 

In the previous version it should be a customization. Please check if partner can update the customization to the version you need.

Hey @smarenich -

Can you confirm that the BCOptionalCategories customization is no longer needed in 2022R1? Sounds like you’re saying that in the comment above ^^^ -- just wanted to double-confirm. Thanks!

@sethkuhn25 yes, customization is not needed anymore. Please don’t forget to make Sales Category entity Active = false in the BigCommerce Stores screen.

Hi @smarenich , just picking up this thread again as I have a query related to this (this is 2021R2). Once matrix items are created, they become Stock Items. Because of this, we can add them into the Item Sales Category. However, how do we add template item into item sales category?

For example, on a store level, I set up Default Stock Categories as “Clothing”. but my template item is a “Sneaker” and I would like it to belong to the Item Sales Category of “Shoes” instead of “Clothing”. How can we achieve this?

@leonchau80 There are sales categories in the template Item, under tab Fulfillment. Doesn’t it work?

ahhh, thank you @smarenich , this is where I missed :)